City-wide TDS outage due to upgrade

CARLSBAD -- Carlsbad residents who have service with TDS Telecom, formerly known as Baja Broadband, were without internet, cable and phone services on Tuesday morning.

Jerry Valles, manager of technical operations at TDS, said the whole system was down, but it was planned.

"We are moving Carlsbad to a state-of-the art system," Valles said, explaining that the new system service is being moved over to is the "Cadillac" of systems.

"Everyone in the city was affected. We took down the whole server at midnight, because our usual maintenance is from midnight to about 6 a.m., but it has spilled over that time period," Valles said.

He said that just like anything else, especially when dealing with electronics, anything that could go wrong, will go wrong.

Internet and phone issues were the main reported problem, but cable was interrupted also.

Valles said all customers should have had reconnected service by Tuesday afternoon, but throughout Wednesday and even parts of next week, customers may experience some issues as TDS continues to ensure the system is running properly.

"I know it's frustrating for our customers, it's frustrating for us. But we are all excited about the better service we are going to be able to offer with this new system," Valles said.

He said that this new system is a major project, but it will bring better internet capability to the area, saying that before this switch-over, Carlsbad was at 100 percent of its capacity, which he said customers may have noticed with their slower speed.

With the upgraded internet, Valles said that they will be able to offer up to 300 megabits per second.